The Tupac Amaru rebellion was one of the most significant events in the history of the Spanish empire. It was the first symptom, and a massive one, of an emerging crisis of Spanish rule in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century. The rebellion began in 1780 in Chayanta, a rural village in northern Potos´ı, and during the following three years expanded northward, encompassing the region around Lake Titicaca, between the cities of Cuzco and La Paz. Its regional evolution reveals a vital web of political relationships among the Aymara and Quechua indigenous people. It also speaks of the significance for Spanish rule of native political expectations and practices in the Andes at the end of the eighteenth century. The two books under review here, recent works by Sergio Serulnikov and Charles Walker, are impressive evidence that the historiography on this rebellion has expanded in new directions in recent decades.

As the Spanish colonial regime approached its end in the Americas, two great political uphea-vals shadowed the thinking of many among the independence- or autonomy-minded Creole elite there, as well as among royalist groups—the Tupac Amaru rebellion in the Andean region (1780–1783) and the Hatian Revolution (1791–1804). Although very different movements in their origins, social composition, political discourse, and outcomes, both these uprisings were characterized by extreme collective and military violence, and both raised the specter of a caste war that might erupt (and in some cases did) within the independence movements.

On April 19th, Chile commemorated the life of Arnold J. Bauer (1931-2015) in a unique ceremony that he would have loved. Some of his closest friends, students, and his wife, Danielle Greenwood, gathered at El Huique hacienda, a beautiful estate (San José del Carmen el Huique) in the Colchagua Valley, two hours outside of Santiago, now a museum.

On February 11th, the Hemispheric Institute on the Americas will hold an all-day conference on the Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru. The event brings together renowned scholars, archivists, and journalists to discuss the vicious war that stretched from 1980 to 1992 and its aftermath. Led by Abimael Guzmán or Presidente Gonzalo, the Maoist Shining Path began in Ayacucho in the highlands and spread throughout much of the country. Both their tactics as well as the response by the Peruvian military were brutal, resulting in over 70,000 dead and hundreds of thousands force to flee. Indigenous peasants bore the brunt of this violence and displacement.